lojack wrote: Not saying the movie is bad, but when Marvel stops publishing the title and gives no support from the comics side or any other tie-in.....

Well this goes to the inherent truth about comics:

They don't make money.

Not the kind of money that a big company like disney really cares about. By the time you pay printers, artists writers etc your not bringing in much, especially from a second tier these days marvel property.

They make money from movie rights-which Marvel sold in the 80s for Fantastic Four, and indie producer has managed to hold on for two decades-so they killed the title like 6 months ago.

Not the kind of money that a big company like disney really cares about. By the time you pay printers, artists writers etc your not bringing in much, especially from a second tier these days marvel property.

They make money from movie rights-which Marvel sold in the 80s for Fantastic Four, and indie producer has managed to hold on for two decades-so they killed the title like 6 months ago.

You got that right.

A smash #1 hit selling comic (Secret Wars was an extreme aberration at > 500k copies for it's #1), is about 200k copies (I don't think this includes Comixology, I should check their methodology).

I'd be surprised if they were making $2/copy, or $400k/month, or about $5M/year. And that's for the <24 comics a year that sell for 200k copies.

A #10 selling comic is usually 70-100k/month -- so they'd be lucking to pull in $1M/year. And they probably have to pay some other costs on top of that, administrative, advertising, etc. The comics themselves aren't where the money is at. I'd suspect that merchandising makes them a LOT more money.

Also lately a good # of the top 10 comics are Star Wars related comics, they make Marvel/Disney money, but compared to the rest of the franchise it's a rounding error.) For that matter, pulling in a $1 Billion for an Avengers movie -- even though the studio only sees a fraction of that ..$100M. is still probably 100 years of Avengers comics sales (i.e. more than Marvel's made total ever selling Avengers comics, and you can probably toss in all the solo titles too, because they hopefully took home more than $100M.

So yeah, Comic Books Sales make some money -- but they can't possibly make Hit Movie level of money. (I'd say they should be able to count non-movie related merchandising -- but the movie related merchandising also probably makes more money.)

Fortunately, you can make a comic book for $5-$10k. But even the artist makes more money selling the original art and commissions than they do from actually making the comic. Pretty much anyone in the comic industry is there because they love it, not to get rich. Artists can easily make more money making storyboards for movies (and I bet the movie industry thinks they're really cheap and incredibly fast).

Fantastic Four when the canceled it was selling not in the top 10, but around the top 80 sales. Which meant that a good run was around 30,000 copies...Whihc translated at 2 bucks an issue(which is probabbly generious to) 60,000 a pop. Which taking out printing costs(which aren't cheep), Editors, Writers, Publicty, etc.....pretty close to break even if that.

But it does promote the intelectual property---which they largely don't own any more. So...why keep it up?

To go to the movie it kind of echos my feeling of the comic: When it was a kind of thoughtful intresting sci Fi movie which had a very interstellar feel to it as in the first trailer i kind of thought it looked neat....then for the last six months they have been promoting it as a big action packed slightly silly superhero film with...still not great looking special effects(especially thing)-pretty badNow this trailer seems to be going back to the first one....but...

Do say Kate Mara from what we have seen looks pretty good in this with an intresting sence of wonder at what shes doing and what she has to do.

FF may not have a monthly comic, but the characters loom large in the Marvel universe. Doom is almost literally at the center of Secret Wars, with Sue Storm at his side. Reed Richards (×2) seems to be set up as his nemesis. The Thing is joining Guardians of the Galaxy, it appears.

They've almost transcended having their own comic, they're so baked into the substrate of Marvel.